At Keenzo.com our customers come first. If
a product is out of stock, we always do our best to help you find it, even if it means sending you to another store! We've provided a convenient link directly to this item at a store we believe may have it in stock for you to buy today. If you still can't find it, please use the 'ALERT ME' button
above to have our staff email you the moment this item is restocked at Keenzo.com.

Annotation:A fascinating history of world literature showcases authors whose work has been destroyed, left unfinished, or remains "unstarted," spanning three thousand years of literary history to describe works that have been lost to time, by Shakespeare, Byron, Plath, Aeschylus, and others. 15,000 first printing.

About the Author(s):Stuart Kelly studied English language and literature at Balliol College, Oxford, where he gained a first-class degree. He is a frequent reviewer for Scotland on Sunday and lives with his wife in Edinburgh.

Editorial Reviews

Source: CahnersPublication: Publishers Weekly ReviewsReview:

Homer's first work, alluded to by Aristotle, was supposedly a comic epic poem. Byron's memoirs were posthumously destroyed, and Ben Jonson didn't live to complete his final play, a pastoral tragicomedy. Flaubert, who suffered seizures that were probably epileptic, kept the text of a scientifically accurate novel about insanity locked up inside his head. At 15, Scottish freelance critic Kelly began compiling a List of Lost Books when he was shocked to learn that there are no extant plays of Agathon, a celebrated fifth century B.C. tragedian and friend of Euripides. "From Shakespeare to Sylvia Plath, Homer to Hemingway, Dante to Ezra Pound, great writers had written works I could not possess," Kelly laments. "The entire history of literature was also the history of the loss of literature." At their best, Kelly's short essays whet the appetite for great works of literature, and serious readers will enjoy scanning these pages looking for curiosities and pondering lost volumes from the oeuvres of Austen, Chaucer and St. Paul. Inevitably, the thesis is more charming than the lengthy execution, and one suspects this would have been much more effective in condensed form as a whimsical article in Harper's or the Atlantic . Illus. (Apr. 25)

Kelly, a reviewer for Scotland on Sunday , presents an account inspired by his love of lost books, which began at the age of 15 on his introduction to Greek literature. He covers manuscripts of stories, poems, and plays that have been destroyed (e.g., Shakespeare's Cardenio ), misplaced or stolen (e.g., Malcolm Lowry's Ultramarine ), unfinished (e.g., Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales ), and even one simply too illegible to read (for which we have Ezra Pound to thank). Also featured are notes by authors who intended to write stories they never began (e.g., Dylan Thomas and Adventures in the Skin Trade ). The writers under discussion span 3000 years of literary history and include Homer, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, and William Burroughs. The short chapters, divided by author, contain fascinating facts and details on how the books became lost and when and why they were written. Each lost book has an underlying tale waiting to be read and treasured. This fantastic compendium is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries and book lovers everywhere.--Susan McClellan, Avalon P.L., Pittsburgh

[Page 86]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents

Introduction

xiii

Anonymous

3

(3)

Homer

6

(9)

Hesiod

15

(3)

The Yahwist, the Elohist, the Deuteronomist, the Priestly Author, and the Redactor

18

(5)

Sappho

23

(3)

K'ung Fu-tzu

26

(4)

Aeschylus

30

(10)

Sophocles

40

(3)

Euripides

43

(3)

Agathon

46

(3)

Aristophanes

49

(4)

Xenocles and Others

53

(2)

Menander

55

(5)

Callimachus

60

(2)

The Caesars

62

(3)

Gallus

65

(2)

Ovid

67

(2)

Longinus

69

(2)

St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus)

71

(4)

Origen

75

(4)

Faltonia Betitia Proba

79

(4)

Kalidasa

83

(3)

Fulgentius

86

(2)

Widsith the Wide-Traveled

88

(2)

The Venerable Bede

90

(5)

Muhammad ibn Ishaq

95

(4)

Ahmad ad-Daqiqi

99

(2)

Dante Alighieri

101

(4)

Geoffrey Chaucer

105

(5)

Francois Villon

110

(3)

John Skelton

113

(2)

Camillo Querno

115

(2)

Luis Vaz de Camoes (Camoens)

117

(3)

Torquato Tasso

120

(6)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

126

(5)

Edmund Spenser

131

(7)

William Shakespeare

138

(8)

John Donne

146

(5)

Ben Jonson

151

(5)

John Milton

156

(9)

Sir Thomas Urquhart

165

(4)

Abraham Cowley

169

(5)

Moliere (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

174

(3)

Jean Racine

177

(6)

Ihara Saikaku

183

(2)

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

185

(7)

Alexander Pope

192

(8)

Dr. Samuel Johnson

200

(3)

Rev. Laurence Sterne

203

(5)

Edward Gibbon

208

(4)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

212

(7)

Robert Fergusson

219

(3)

James Hogg

222

(4)

Sir Walter Scott

226

(4)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

230

(4)

Jane Austen

234

(6)

George Gordon, Lord Byron

240

(4)

Thomas Carlyle

244

(5)

Heinrich Heine

249

(3)

Joseph Smith Jr.

252

(4)

Nikolai Gogol

256

(4)

Charles Dickens

260

(6)

Herman Melville

266

(4)

Gustave Flaubert

270

(5)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

275

(5)

Sir Richard Burton

280

(5)

Algernon Charles Swinburne

285

(2)

Emile Zola

287

(6)

Arthur Rimbaud

293

(3)

Frank Norris

296

(3)

Franz Kafka

299

(5)

Ezra Loomis Pound

304

(5)

Thomas Steams Eliot

309

(2)

Thomas Edward Lawrence

311

(3)

Bruno Schulz

314

(3)

Ernest Hemingway

317

(2)

Dylan Marlais Thomas

319

(3)

William Seward Burroughs

322

(3)

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV

325

(4)

Sylvia Plath

329

(3)

Georges Perec

332

(4)

Conclusion

336

(3)

Acknowledgments

339

(2)

Index

341

Excerpt

The Book of Lost Books

By Stuart Kelly

Random House

Stuart Kelly
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1400062977

Chapter One

Anonymous

c. 75,000 b.c.e.—c. 2800 b.c.e.

The very origins of literature are lost.

An oblong piece of ocher, found in the Blombos Caves on the southern coast of present-day South Africa, is crosshatched with a regular pattern of diamonds and triangles. It is 77,000 years old. Whether these geometric designs are supposed to be symbolic, whether they are supposed to mean anything at all, they present us with one irrefutable fact. A precursor of modern humanity deliberately engraved marks onto a medium. It was a long way yet to the word processor and text messages, but a first step of sorts had been taken.

The period around 45,000 to 35,000 years ago in humanity’s evolution has been called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution or, more catchily, the Creative Explosion. More complex tools were fashioned, from fishhooks to buttons to needles. Moreover, they are decorated, not only with schemata of lines and dots: a lamp contains an ibex, a spear tip transforms into a bison. There are also statuettes with no immediately discernible use: squat figurines of dumpy women. Is it possible to have slings but not songs, arrows but not stories?

Looking at the cave paintings from Lascaux, Altamira, and Chavette, created some 18,000 years ago, it is overwhelmingly tempting to try and read them. Do these images record successful hunts, or are they imagined desires and hopes? Is this “Yesterday we killed an aurochs” or “Once upon a time there was an aurochs”? What do the squiggles and zigzags, the claviforms and tectiforms over the animal images signify? Occasionally, looming out from an inconceivably distant time, a human handprint appears, outlined in pigment. A signature, on a work we cannot interpret.

Where did writing come from? Every early culture has a deity who invents it: Nabu in Assyria, Thoth in Egypt, Tenjin in Japan, Oghma in Ireland, Hermes in Greece. The actual explanation may be far less glamorous—accountants in Mesopotamia. All the earliest writing documents, in the blunt, wedge-shaped cuneiform style, are records of transactions, stock-keeping, and inventories. Before cursives and uncials, gothic scripts and runic alphabets, hieroglyphics and ideograms, we had tally marks.

But, by the first few centuries of the second millennium b.c.e., we know that literature has begun, has begun to be recorded, and has begun to spread. It was not until 1872 that the first fragments of The Epic of Gilgamesh resurfaced in the public domain after four millennia. The excavation of ancient Nineveh had been undertaken by Austen Henry Layard in 1839. Nearly twenty-five thousand broken clay tablets were sent back to the British Museum, and the painstaking work of deciphering the cuneiform markings commenced in earnest. The Nineveh inscriptions were incomplete, and dated from the seventh century b.c.e., when King Ashurbanipal of Assyria had ordered his troops to seek out the ancient wisdom in the cities of Babylon, Uruk, and Nippur. These spoils of war were then translated into Akkadian from the original Sumerian.

Over time, the poem was supplemented by more ancient versions discovered in Nippur and Uruk, as well as copies from places as far apart as Boghazköy in Asia Minor and Megiddo in Israel. Gradually, an almost complete version of The Epic of Gilgamesh was assembled out of Hittite, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian, and Old Babylonian.

Who first wrote it? We do not know. Was it part of a wider cycle of myths and legends? Possibly, even probably, and there is a slim chance that further archaeological research will answer this. What, finally, is it about?

Gilgamesh is a powerful king of Uruk. The gods create an equal for him in the figure of Enkidu, a wild man, brought up among beasts and tempted into civilization by sex. They become firm friends, and travel together to the forest, where they slay the ferocious giant Humbaba, who guards the cedar trees. This infuriates the goddess Ishtar, who sends a bull from Heaven to defeat them. They kill and sacrifice it, and Ishtar decides that the way to harm Gilgamesh is through the death of Enkidu. Distraught, Gilgamesh travels through the Underworld in search of eternal life, and eventually meets with Utnapishtim at the ends of the world. Utnapishtim was the only human wise enough to escape the Flood, and, after forcing Gilgamesh through a purification ceremony, shows him a flower called “The Old Are Young Again.” It eludes his grasp, and Gilgamesh dies.

The themes resonate through recorded literary endeavor. Gilgamesh wrestles with mortality; he declares he will “set up his name where the names of the famous are written.” Death is inevitable and incomprehensible. Even the giant Humbaba is given a pitiable scene where he begs for his life. Prayers, elegies, riddles, dreams, and prophecies intersperse the adventure; fabulous beasts sit alongside real men and women. The fact that we can discern different styles and genres within The Epic of Gilgamesh hints that unknown versions existed prior to it.

All the earliest authors are anonymous. A legendary name, an Orpheus or Taliesin, serves as a conjectural origin, a myth to shroud the namelessness of our culture’s beginnings. Although anonymity is still practiced, it is as a ruse to conceal Deep Throats, both investigative and pornographic. It is a choice, whereas for generations of writers so absolutely lost that no line, no title, no name survives, it is a destiny thrust upon them. They might write, and struggle, and edit, and polish, yet their frail papers dissipate, and all their endeavor is utterly erased. To those of whom no trace remains, this book is an offering. For we will join them, in the end.

Homer

c. late eighth century b.c.e.

Homer was . . .

The verb’s the problem here. Was there even such a person as Homer?

There was, or there was believed to be, a Homer: minds as skeptical as Aristotle’s and as gullible as Herodotus’ knew there was, of sorts, a, once, Homer.

“But when t’ examine ev’ry part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” was Pope’s interpretation.

Samuel Butler, in “The Authoress of the Odyssey” (1897), proposed that at least half of Homer was a woman.

E. V. Rieu, in 1946, patriotically complained:

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have from time to time afforded a first class battleground for scholars. In the nineteenth century in particular, German critics were at endless pains to show, not only that the two works are not the product of a single brain, but that each is a piece of intricate and rather ill-sewn patch-work. In this process Homer disappeared.

The imperishable Homer dwindles, a hum, an er, an inconclusive pause. Let’s begin with what we know: Il. and Od. Two long poems exist, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and somehow someone somebody called Homer became convoluted within them.

The Iliad and The Odyssey were considered by the Greeks to be the pinnacle of their literary achievements, and subsequent centuries and countries have concurred. Egyptian papyrus fragments of the texts outnumber all other texts and authors put together; the two poems are the basis for many of the tragedies and are quoted, almost with reverence, by critics, rhetoricians, and historians. It is tempting to extract information about the poet from the poetry, as did Thomas Blackwell, who, in “An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer” (1735), found such a happy similarity between the work and the world. Or, like the archaeologist and inveterate pilferer Schliemann, one might scour the coasts of Asia Minor in search of hot springs and cold fountains similar to those in the verse. But Homer, himself, herself, whatever, is irredeemably slippery.

Take customs. Bronze weaponry is ubiquitous in The Iliad, and iron a rarity, leading one to assume the poem describes a Mycenean Bronze Age battle. Yet the corpses are all cremated, never interred, a practice associated with the post-Mycenean Iron Age. The spear and its effect are historically incompatible. The language itself bristles with inconsistencies. Predominantly in the Ionic dialect, it contains traces of the Aeolic, hints of Arcado-Cypriot. Are these the snapped-up snatches of a wandering bard, linguistic sticky-burrs hitching on to the oral original? Or the buried lineaments of disparate myths corralled into a cycle, the brick from a Roman villa reused in the Gothic cathedral? The artificer cannot be extrapolated from the artifact.

To the Greeks, The Iliad and The Odyssey were not the works of a poet, but of the Poet. So impressed were the people of Argos with their inclusion in The Iliad that they set up a bronze statue of Homer, and sacrificed to it daily.

Seven cities—Argos, Athens, Chios, Colophon, Rhodes, Salamis, and Smyrna—claim to be the birthplace of Homer, although, significantly, all did so after his death. When he was born is just as contentious: Eratosthenes places it at 1159 b.c.e., so that the Trojan War would have still been in living memory, though a plethora of birthdates up until 685 b.c.e. have been offered. Most opt for the end of the ninth century b.c.e., a convenient average of the extremities. His father was called Maeon, or Meles, or Mnesagoras, or Daemon, or Thamyras, or Menemachus, and may have been a market trader, soldier, or priestly scribe, while his mother might be Metis or Cretheis, Themista or Eugnetho, or, like his father, Meles.

One extensive genealogy traces him back to his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great- great-grandfather, the god Apollo, via the mythic poet Orpheus and his wife, the muse Calliope (though she has also been advanced as his mother). Since, as a muse, she would undoubtedly have been immortal, this is possible, though unsavory.

The Emperor Hadrian tried to untangle these contradictory accounts by asking the Pythian Sibyl for her tuppence, and was told, “Ithaca is his country, Telemachus his father, and Epicasta, daughter of Nestor, the mother that bore him, a man by far the wisest of mortals.” If she was correct, and Telemachus, the son of Odysseus, was Homer’s sire, The Odyssey becomes a biography of his grandfather as much as an epic poem.

At Chios, a group of later rhapsodes announced themselves as the Homeridae, or the sons of Homer, who solemnly learned, recited, and preserved the works of the Poet. Were there literal as well as figurative offspring? Tzetzes mentions that a poem called The Cypria, dealing with the prequel to the Trojan War and attributed to one Stasinus, was for the most part written by Homer, and given to the poet Stasinus, along with money, as part of a dowry. One presumes that this means that Homer had a daughter. The Cypria, however, was also sometimes thought to be the work of Hegesias of Troezen; little of it survives, and it is thus impossible to confirm the conjectural daughter.

Accounts agree, however, on one important feature. The Poet was blind. The birthplace claim of Smyrna is bolstered by the contention that homer, in their dialect, means “blind” (though not, as in the description of the Cyclops, in The Odyssey). A section in the Hymn to Delian Apollo is taken, by vague tradition, to be a self-description of Homer—or Melesigenes, as he was called before the Smyrnans christened him “Blindy”:

“Who think ye, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?” Then answer, each and all, with one voice: “He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.” As for me, I will carry your renown as far as I roam over the earth to the well-placed cities of man, and they will believe also; for indeed this thing is true.

It seems that, rather than being born sightless, Homer went blind: cataracts, diabetic glaucoma, infection by the nematode Toxocara. The later poet Stesichorus was struck blind by the gods for slandering Helen, and only had his sight miraculously restored when he rewrote his work, insisting that Helen had not eloped. Instead, she had been spirited away to Egypt and replaced with a phantom fashioned of clouds. Stesichorus blamed Homer, and Homer’s version of events, for his temporary loss of sight. Presumably Homer’s blindness was occasioned by a similar infraction. If, after The Iliad, he was struck blind, then the blinding of Polyphemus the Cyclops in The Odyssey must supposedly be drawn from personal experience.

The place of Homer’s death, thankfully, is barely in dispute: the island of Ios. Indeed, Homer himself was informed by a Pythian Sibyl that he would die on Ios, after hearing a children’s riddle. She referred to the island as the homeplace of his mother (but Nestor’s daughter came from Pylos, a good 150 miles away! One of the priestesses must be mistaken). Eventually Homer went to Ios, to stay with Creophylus. What qualities or creature comforts this Creophylus possessed that would make the bard travel to exactly the place where he had been warned that he would die must be left to the imagination. On the beach he met with some children who had been fishing. When he asked them if they had caught anything, they replied, “All that we caught we left behind and we are carrying all that we did not catch.” Nonplussed, he asked for an explanation, and was rewarded with the information that they were talking about their fleas. Suddenly remembering the oracle and its dire warning about riddling kids, Homer composed his epitaph, and died three days later.

At least we have the texts; the 27,803 lines that are “Homer.” But even these are susceptible to error. Despite the best efforts of the Homeridae, the texts were unstable, misremembered, interpolated. The librarians of Alexandria—Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus—all later endeavored to fix the text, to staunch the ebb of letters. The two poems were divided into books, each poem into twenty-four books, exactly the number of letters in the Greek alphabet.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Book of Lost Books
by Stuart Kelly Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

The RANDOM HOUSE 9781400062973 has not yet been reviewed. You can be the first to Create an Online Review for this product and share your experiences with other customers!

Related Products

This page contains information (descriptions, images, and specifications) obtained by KEENZO from manufacturers and other industry sources believed to be reliable. KEENZO makes no warranties or representations with respect to the performance of the products or accuracy of the information. Any and all warranties, whether written or oral, expressed or implied, are hereby expressly disclaimed by KEENZO, including, but not limited to, warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose and liability arising from errors and omissions in the information. It is your sole responsibility to evaluate the accuracy of, completeness, and usefulness of the information. If you feel the information for RANDOM HOUSE 9781400062973 may be incorrect, please
click here to let us know (The page will simply refresh).